Re: Worried about SAS Job.

My personal view/experience is that it's very hard to get a foot into any job market without experience. The way I've seen people get into the SAS market is a) directly from Uni via associate programs or b) being employees at a site where SAS had been newly introduced and they were just at the right time in the right place. The other way is people with subject matter expertise who start to use SAS for doing their job (eg. Analytics).

I for myself got into it many years ago because SAS was what had been used at Uni in my department - and then I needed to finance Uni and there was this government agency who was looking for a cheap student to do some basic reporting with SAS.

Re: Worried about SAS Job.

What region are you working in? I would get the BASE SAS certification, Advanced SAS certification, and BI developer certification. If you are good at administering systems, go for the SAS Administration certification. You can take course work from SAS (expensive), read the course books ($100 each), buy the preparation books. There is a SAS professional license ($199 for 6 months and $299 for 12 months) available (SAS&reg; Solutions OnDemand Support). Your local SAS User Group probably has meetings. The one I co-chair is in PDX and they are free, but only occur once a year.

For job hunting I use www.indeed.com and www.linkup.com. Post your resume and once you have certifications, you will get a lot of headhunters calling. The jobs may not be great though.

Do not underprice yourself. Hiring managers and headhunters know the market rate for SAS programmers and someone that asks for too little will be looked over.

Most companies are not posting to job boards either. Job boards are expensive and they have their own internal web pages often. You may have to look at who licenses SAS and just start networking your way in.

Re: Worried about SAS Job.

This is good advice. The web site for the SAS OnDemand for Professionals (SODP) license is here (SAS OnDemand for Professionals). The SAS OnDemand for Academics license is only applicable to an access that is set up by a professor for his/her entire class. So the SAS OnDemand for Professionals license is what individual learners acquire for the prices listed in the previous post.

On the SODP web site, look on the Features tab for information about which SAS products are available on the SODP server. Look on the Learning Options tab to see the courses and books for which data has already been loaded on the server. Look on the Customer Support tab for information about how to use the SAS OnDemand license with the SAS Enterprise Guide client. (And, note the System Requirements tab, to make sure that your system conforms to the necessary software.) You will note from the info on the Features tab that the BI Platform classes and BI install data are *NOT* loaded onto the server, so while you can practice for the Base Programmer and Advanced Programmer exam using the SAS OnDemand for Professionals license, you cannot practice for the BI Content Developer or the Platform Administrator exams using the SODP license. Currently, the SODP license is only available in the United States and Canada, but we are building out the infrastructure to offer the license in other countries. The main SODP page has an interest list, where you can enter your name and country to be notified when the license is available in your country.